If you have the bandwidth and the patience, I have made a podcast of this too, my second. Sound quality is still a little poor - I can’t get Audacity to run properly on my Intel based mac.
I walked from BB or Bukit Bintang to KLCC as the city centre of Kuala Lumpur is know, somewhat unattractively. Most insistingly prominent in KLCC are the Petronas Towers and Suria Plaza. If you have gone to all that trouble of producing such massive structures, surely you could come up with a cool name for the heart of the new Malaysia. The towers, soaring like the erect penises of a couple of young men, stand testimony to the ambitions of an aging politician. To Mahathir, who in part conceived these buildings as part of his strategy to inculcate national pride in Malaysia, such a comparison would be an anathema. It was he, after all, who had his protege and deputy prime-minister arrested on bogus charges of sodomy. To the outside observer, it appears that Mahathir started to lose it in the last days of his leadership. Shortly before he resigned in 2003 he claimed that Anglo-Saxon Europeans were proponents of war, sodomy and genocide, before going on to describe how the world was ruled by a secret Jewish cabal. Perhaps to have given these massive building projects a stimulating name would have been to associate them with declining primeministerial prowess. In the course of everyday utterance, Malay has admirable brevity. It is only in more formal or literary instances that the circumlocutions of the language comes to the fore. Abbreviations then fit well with the malaise of daily discourse. So KLCC it is.
My taxi driver fumbled blindly in the glove compartment, his chin almost on the dashboard and his eyes fixed on the road’s chaos. “Viagra” he said, triumphantly, holding a box aloft and turning round briefly, just missing a mini pulling away from the curb. He grinned lasciviously, the packet being half empty. “Very good sex.” he said, “You buy? I sell you? You want lady? You have nice camera - how much?” He went on and on, one offensive or intrusive question after another. It had just started raining and the roads had filled instantly with a river of traffic; a five minute ride became a twenty minute verbal assault on my sensibilities. It gave me an idea though, once I had got over the idea that I must now look of an age where passion needs pharmacological scaffolding. Viagra would be a good name for the city centre, although it could imply folly and futility, rather than the permanent thrust into the 21st century desired by the government.
Is it Darwinian evolution that has produced that particular subspecies of humanity, the taxi driver? Dangerous and with an unparalleled tallent for irritation, KL’s taxi drivers spend most of their time lounging about chatting to their friends, like teaching assistants at playtime. Legally, taxis are metered and before entering you need to agree that the metre will be switched on. The chance would be a fine thing. Three of every four taxis I approached today refused to take me to where I wanted to go. On one occasion I had to negotiate not the fare but the destination in order to get a ride. I faced the same problem here in the early 1990s, but then the drivers would refuse short rides away from the honey pots and their palls, deeming them not worthwhile. Now the decision to take a fare seems determined by the difficulty of traffic - professional drivers want to drive, not sit in a gridlock, even at 20 Sen for 45 seconds.
With an arse that size he has to be American, a suspicion confirmed by excessive volume and limited vocabulary, disturbing the peace of the cafe in which I am writing. Middle aged Chinese shop owners excepted (a scruffy bunch), Malaysians must spend a much higher percentage of their income on clothes than the British. Well dressed and with a general glow of fitness, the people of Kuala Lumpur stand in stark contrast to the average tourist who is scruffy and wilting in the humidity, an unhealthy, greasy sheen of sweat marking them out as foreigners.
What should you call someone from KL? A Kuala Lumpan? It doesn’t have the right connotations, suggesting more and less than is true of this particular proletariat. Lumpen, in one sense perhaps, for I see little interest in the type of revolution Marx wrote about, although the pace of capitalistic development that has gripped the country in the last twenty five years must be considered a revolution of sorts. Nor are they boorish or stupid, to use the word’s other meaning. Anyway, with the local propensity to abbreviate, the term would become klumpens and “I am a klumpan” just sounds wrong. Alternatively, a KLian (Kay-el-ian) sounds OK, but it would be open to mispronunciation, Klian sounding too much like a character out of Star Trek.
Beneath the twin towers of KLCC is the Pentronas Concert Hall, home to the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. I went to the box office to see what was on. An pianist, of whom I had never heard, was to perform Tchaikovsky. I thought I would buy tickets, but as I selected my seat the clerk stretched over the counter and peered contemptuously at my t-shirt and shorts before advising that there was a dress code, and that I might wish to ‘consider first’ if I had the right clothes before buying a ticket. This annoyed me and I felt prompted to remind her that she was working a till, hardly a prestigious occupation, despite her nice suit. Clothing has become part of the pretensions of Malaysian development, fashion a veneer of wealth hiding more rural, peasant origins. I decided not to go to the concert as this would have involved me going to buy shoes, neither my sandals nor trainers being acceptable. What does in mean when the best opera houses and concert halls of Europe don’t have dress codes, but those in a small Asian country, just risen from the rice fields do? Irritated and feeling irrational I decided to go climbing.
Camp 5 is a new climbing wall, the showpiece of Block, an multinational company with over two hundred walls to its credit. Within a year of its opening, they have managed to increase the number of climbers in Malaysia by 20%. With a facility like this it is hardly surprising. In August this year Malaysia will host the the world cup - an event likely to give the sport a huge boost. Camp 5 is on the top floor of 1 Utama, a new shopping complex in Petaling Jaya, part of the huge conurbation of Klang Valley. It advertises itself as being in KL, and indeed you certainly don’t pass through any countryside on your way there, even though it is over thirty minutes from the centre by car, and that is if there are no traffic jams.
In the early 1990s I was very impressed with KL’s shopping centres. I had never seen anything on the scale and luxury of Lot 10 and KL Plaza. A decade and a half later, those particular centres look old-fashioned and small; not perhaps by the standards of northern England or Saudi Arabia, but in comparison to the malls that have opened here recently. In 2005, 3.23 million square feet of retail space opened in the Klang Valley alone, adding 13 major shopping complexes. 1 Utama is not the biggest mall near KL, but to give some sense of the size of these places, it takes 16 minutes just to circumnavigate one of its 3 main shopping floors, and that at a brisk walk.
To the urban Malaysian, walking, out of doors at least, is not a popular pursuit. Cars are a status symbol in Malaysia and the Mercedes the marque of choice for many, if they can afford it. Unlike other oil producing countries, there isn’t the wealth here yet, and so black shiny Mercedes are the exception, small, somewhat ordinary cars being the norm. There are millons of them though, and in town moving, for the most part, at walking pace. To overcome the traffic problems, an overhead railway line has been built through the centre of the city and this connects, or nearly so, with several other train lines to different parts of the Klang Valley. All are operated by different companies and, to the casual observer, the system appears chaotic. Trying to make sense of it all I went to the information bureau in the Sentral Station. It was closed. All day. The only shop to be so. In frustration, I abandoned the train and paid through the nose for a taxi.
Returning from 1 Utama was also frustrating. There was a huge queue for taxis, without a taxi in sight. I waited for twenty minutes then gave up and went for dinner. Returning an hour later I enlisted the help of a Nepalese security guard who had fled his country during the recent protests “to save his life”. He seemed to find solace in talking to another foreigner, especially when I told him that I had visited his home town on the Indian border. Taking me by the elbow, he quickly found me a taxi, bumping me to the front of the queue. “These Malaysians not good people, sir” was his parting shot.
The late Benny Hill’s Chinese character is alive and well, driving a taxi in Petaling Jaya. He refused to take me to KL - “Don’t like driving in KL lah!” and took me to the nearest LRT railway station instead, telling me how to get back to Bukit Bintang. On the way he started talking about football under the impression, no doubt, that being English I should have an interest in the sport. When it became clear that I knew little more than it is a game played with a ball, and that Malaysians are keen on it, his behaviour changed. Obviously my lack of knowledge of the game was a clear indication of some mental deficiency. Worried lest I get lost in the wilds of Petaling Jaya, he repeated the instructions for my return journey a further four times, punctuating the lecture with the occasional “Sooo you don’t know football lah!”. Eventually returning to football though, he explained that although betting is illegal in Malaysia, there is a frenzy of betting activity on the World Cup. I wondered why the government would waste such an opportunity of raising some tax income, but then perhaps the illegal betting is controlled by people of some influence here.
Finally, back in Bukit Bintang after what felt like an epic journey, I relaxed with a durian outside my hotel. The doorman wouldn’t let me bring it inside.
I walked from BB or Bukit Bintang to KLCC as the city centre of Kuala Lumpur is know, somewhat unattractively. Most insistingly prominent in KLCC are the Petronas Towers and Suria Plaza. If you have gone to all that trouble of producing such massive structures, surely you could come up with a cool name for the heart of the new Malaysia. The towers, soaring like the erect penises of a couple of young men, stand testimony to the ambitions of an aging politician. To Mahathir, who in part conceived these buildings as part of his strategy to inculcate national pride in Malaysia, such a comparison would be an anathema. It was he, after all, who had his protege and deputy prime-minister arrested on bogus charges of sodomy. To the outside observer, it appears that Mahathir started to lose it in the last days of his leadership. Shortly before he resigned in 2003 he claimed that Anglo-Saxon Europeans were proponents of war, sodomy and genocide, before going on to describe how the world was ruled by a secret Jewish cabal. Perhaps to have given these massive building projects a stimulating name would have been to associate them with declining primeministerial prowess. In the course of everyday utterance, Malay has admirable brevity. It is only in more formal or literary instances that the circumlocutions of the language comes to the fore. Abbreviations then fit well with the malaise of daily discourse. So KLCC it is.
My taxi driver fumbled blindly in the glove compartment, his chin almost on the dashboard and his eyes fixed on the road’s chaos. “Viagra” he said, triumphantly, holding a box aloft and turning round briefly, just missing a mini pulling away from the curb. He grinned lasciviously, the packet being half empty. “Very good sex.” he said, “You buy? I sell you? You want lady? You have nice camera - how much?” He went on and on, one offensive or intrusive question after another. It had just started raining and the roads had filled instantly with a river of traffic; a five minute ride became a twenty minute verbal assault on my sensibilities. It gave me an idea though, once I had got over the idea that I must now look of an age where passion needs pharmacological scaffolding. Viagra would be a good name for the city centre, although it could imply folly and futility, rather than the permanent thrust into the 21st century desired by the government.
Is it Darwinian evolution that has produced that particular subspecies of humanity, the taxi driver? Dangerous and with an unparalleled tallent for irritation, KL’s taxi drivers spend most of their time lounging about chatting to their friends, like teaching assistants at playtime. Legally, taxis are metered and before entering you need to agree that the metre will be switched on. The chance would be a fine thing. Three of every four taxis I approached today refused to take me to where I wanted to go. On one occasion I had to negotiate not the fare but the destination in order to get a ride. I faced the same problem here in the early 1990s, but then the drivers would refuse short rides away from the honey pots and their palls, deeming them not worthwhile. Now the decision to take a fare seems determined by the difficulty of traffic - professional drivers want to drive, not sit in a gridlock, even at 20 Sen for 45 seconds.
With an arse that size he has to be American, a suspicion confirmed by excessive volume and limited vocabulary, disturbing the peace of the cafe in which I am writing. Middle aged Chinese shop owners excepted (a scruffy bunch), Malaysians must spend a much higher percentage of their income on clothes than the British. Well dressed and with a general glow of fitness, the people of Kuala Lumpur stand in stark contrast to the average tourist who is scruffy and wilting in the humidity, an unhealthy, greasy sheen of sweat marking them out as foreigners.
What should you call someone from KL? A Kuala Lumpan? It doesn’t have the right connotations, suggesting more and less than is true of this particular proletariat. Lumpen, in one sense perhaps, for I see little interest in the type of revolution Marx wrote about, although the pace of capitalistic development that has gripped the country in the last twenty five years must be considered a revolution of sorts. Nor are they boorish or stupid, to use the word’s other meaning. Anyway, with the local propensity to abbreviate, the term would become klumpens and “I am a klumpan” just sounds wrong. Alternatively, a KLian (Kay-el-ian) sounds OK, but it would be open to mispronunciation, Klian sounding too much like a character out of Star Trek.
Beneath the twin towers of KLCC is the Pentronas Concert Hall, home to the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. I went to the box office to see what was on. An pianist, of whom I had never heard, was to perform Tchaikovsky. I thought I would buy tickets, but as I selected my seat the clerk stretched over the counter and peered contemptuously at my t-shirt and shorts before advising that there was a dress code, and that I might wish to ‘consider first’ if I had the right clothes before buying a ticket. This annoyed me and I felt prompted to remind her that she was working a till, hardly a prestigious occupation, despite her nice suit. Clothing has become part of the pretensions of Malaysian development, fashion a veneer of wealth hiding more rural, peasant origins. I decided not to go to the concert as this would have involved me going to buy shoes, neither my sandals nor trainers being acceptable. What does in mean when the best opera houses and concert halls of Europe don’t have dress codes, but those in a small Asian country, just risen from the rice fields do? Irritated and feeling irrational I decided to go climbing.
Camp 5 is a new climbing wall, the showpiece of Block, an multinational company with over two hundred walls to its credit. Within a year of its opening, they have managed to increase the number of climbers in Malaysia by 20%. With a facility like this it is hardly surprising. In August this year Malaysia will host the the world cup - an event likely to give the sport a huge boost. Camp 5 is on the top floor of 1 Utama, a new shopping complex in Petaling Jaya, part of the huge conurbation of Klang Valley. It advertises itself as being in KL, and indeed you certainly don’t pass through any countryside on your way there, even though it is over thirty minutes from the centre by car, and that is if there are no traffic jams.
In the early 1990s I was very impressed with KL’s shopping centres. I had never seen anything on the scale and luxury of Lot 10 and KL Plaza. A decade and a half later, those particular centres look old-fashioned and small; not perhaps by the standards of northern England or Saudi Arabia, but in comparison to the malls that have opened here recently. In 2005, 3.23 million square feet of retail space opened in the Klang Valley alone, adding 13 major shopping complexes. 1 Utama is not the biggest mall near KL, but to give some sense of the size of these places, it takes 16 minutes just to circumnavigate one of its 3 main shopping floors, and that at a brisk walk.
To the urban Malaysian, walking, out of doors at least, is not a popular pursuit. Cars are a status symbol in Malaysia and the Mercedes the marque of choice for many, if they can afford it. Unlike other oil producing countries, there isn’t the wealth here yet, and so black shiny Mercedes are the exception, small, somewhat ordinary cars being the norm. There are millons of them though, and in town moving, for the most part, at walking pace. To overcome the traffic problems, an overhead railway line has been built through the centre of the city and this connects, or nearly so, with several other train lines to different parts of the Klang Valley. All are operated by different companies and, to the casual observer, the system appears chaotic. Trying to make sense of it all I went to the information bureau in the Sentral Station. It was closed. All day. The only shop to be so. In frustration, I abandoned the train and paid through the nose for a taxi.
Returning from 1 Utama was also frustrating. There was a huge queue for taxis, without a taxi in sight. I waited for twenty minutes then gave up and went for dinner. Returning an hour later I enlisted the help of a Nepalese security guard who had fled his country during the recent protests “to save his life”. He seemed to find solace in talking to another foreigner, especially when I told him that I had visited his home town on the Indian border. Taking me by the elbow, he quickly found me a taxi, bumping me to the front of the queue. “These Malaysians not good people, sir” was his parting shot.
The late Benny Hill’s Chinese character is alive and well, driving a taxi in Petaling Jaya. He refused to take me to KL - “Don’t like driving in KL lah!” and took me to the nearest LRT railway station instead, telling me how to get back to Bukit Bintang. On the way he started talking about football under the impression, no doubt, that being English I should have an interest in the sport. When it became clear that I knew little more than it is a game played with a ball, and that Malaysians are keen on it, his behaviour changed. Obviously my lack of knowledge of the game was a clear indication of some mental deficiency. Worried lest I get lost in the wilds of Petaling Jaya, he repeated the instructions for my return journey a further four times, punctuating the lecture with the occasional “Sooo you don’t know football lah!”. Eventually returning to football though, he explained that although betting is illegal in Malaysia, there is a frenzy of betting activity on the World Cup. I wondered why the government would waste such an opportunity of raising some tax income, but then perhaps the illegal betting is controlled by people of some influence here.
Finally, back in Bukit Bintang after what felt like an epic journey, I relaxed with a durian outside my hotel. The doorman wouldn’t let me bring it inside.
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